Piazza

Piazza is an online question-and-answer application that instructors can use to encourage written discussions involving students, teaching assistants, and instructors.

Piazza

Availability Add Piazza to your Canvas Course menu through Settings > Navigation. Students will need to create a Piazza account and agree to the terms of use the first time they use the tool.
Canvas Integration Access Piazza from within Canvas.
Privacy Piazza is NOT FIPPA compliant; data is stored outside of Canada.  See Important! below.
Similar Tools Discussions within Canvas and polls in iClicker Cloud.

Important!

The Piazza tool is stored on servers outside Canada. When you access this site by clicking on the link through Canvas, you are being transferred to these servers. In order to protect your identity, UBC obfuscates your user ID before it is sent to the site. However, Piazza does require you to create an account on their servers. While Piazza adheres to strict U.S. privacy regulations (FERPA), UBC cannot guarantee security of your private details on servers outside of Canada. Please exercise caution whenever using personal information. You may wish to use a pseudonym to protect your privacy if you have concerns.

About Piazza

Piazza is a tool that allows anyone enrolled in a course to ask questions to instructors and other students. Allowing students to teach other students, conversations on Piazza can continue outside of office hours. Piazza gives students anonymity options (to other students) to encourage everyone to ask and answer questions. Instructor endorsements of good questions and answers let instructors push the class in the right direction.

Features

  1. Students can post questions. The following can answer the questions posted:
    • Instructors
    • Teaching Assistants
    • Other students
  2. TAs and professors can approve the student’s answers. Professors can post updates, solutions to exams and assignments.
  3. People can post anonymously to other classmates, but professors and TAs are able to view the users’ actions.
  4. Instructors can post multiple choice questions, while the class is in session.
  5. Has iClicker features where teachers can poll during class. Piazza serves as an alternative to iClicker, instructors have the option to grade the responses.

More Support